This is the second book I've read by Marion Zimmer Bradley (the first being The Shattered Chain, to which Thendara House is sequel) and, in closing it, my feelings are of deep gratitude. First, to Bradley, whom I now recognize as an author I can trust--something I need very much as a constant reader, a relatively new feminist, and a young woman learning how to live in a world made for a certain kind of man. I need stories that take me away from my physical surroundings, yet help me work through issues (of identity, sexuality, relations with men and with women, society) that I face in the real world. Bradley tackles these issues head-on, without oversimplification or neat endings. And her books are peopled with strong, fully human women, satisfying another need, which did not pass when I became an adult: for role-model characters, women to look up to. In this way Bradley is Tamora Pierce for grown-ups.

I'm grateful also, upon finishing Thendara House, to a second party: the women's movement. As a feminist in this world I am constantly aware of its failures, in thought and word and deed. But The Shattered Chain and Thendara House, published in 1976 and 1983, remind me of how much feminism has accomplished, in my lifetime alone. The Darkover books are set in a far-distant future, on a colony planet of Earth. When I imagine the dominant human society a thousand years from now, I cannot conceive of a woman whose official, standard form of address is "Mrs. Peter Haldane." I don't think a future space culture would likely involve revealing, spandex uniforms with high heels for women, or assumptions that a women's gender is what prevents her from achieving high office. Yet Thendara House presents all these things; characters fight against them, but they are mainstream. Twenty-five years later American society--not all of it, but a substantial minority at least--can take for granted freedoms and rights that Bradley in 1983 thought would still be contended for centuries from now.